Although Nimbus had never heard of Victor Hugo, he had applied to his late enemy the same name given it by the great French writer, the “devil-fish,” which is so wonderfully described in the “Toilers of the Sea.” “Well, I think it was a sea-serpent,” said Breeze, “and I’m not sure but what there were half a dozen of them, too.” When Captain Coffin heard their story, and saw the portions of the monster that still remained in the dory, he fully realized the peril they had been in, and congratulated them upon their escape from the embrace of a giant cuttle-fish. He measured the largest of the arms that Nimbus had cut from the creature’s body. It was bloodless, and composed entirely of gristle, and from its length the skipper concluded the creature must have measured twenty feet from tip to tip of two of its arms. “But what kind of a beast was it?” asked Breeze. “It had big eyes, and seemed to be swimming in ink, but I could not see any tail or fins.” “No, it did not have any. Its body was simply a round, leathery sack, about as big as a medium-sized squash. It had a horny beak like a parrot’s, and could have given you an ugly bite if it had got hold of you. The ink that it threw out was the sepia of commerce, from which India-ink is made. The creature was the giant squid, or octopus. He had eight arms, and but for your knife would undoubtedly have dragged you both to the bottom of the ocean.” “Do they often attack people?” asked Breeze. “No; they rarely appear on the surface of the water, and this fellow would not have done so if one of your trawl-hooks had not caught him. He belongs to the same family as the little squid we catch in such quantities on the Banks for cod bait.” “I’d hate to have to catch such a fellow as he was for bait,” said Breeze, with a shudder. “He’d make good whale bait,” replied the skipper. “There’s nothing the sperm-whale likes better. I once saw a piece of the arm of a cuttle-fish, thirty feet long, taken from a dead whale’s mouth, and we calculated that the creature to which it had belonged must have measured one hundred and twenty feet from tip to tip.” “I thought a whale’s throat was too small to swallow a thing like that,” said Breeze. “Not the throat of a sperm-whale. That is large enough to swallow ’most anything. You are thinking of the right whale. He couldn’t swallow a mackerel, his throat is so small.” One afternoon, ten days after this incident, by which time the crew of the _Fish-hawk_ were heartily tired of the cold, stormy weather of the North Atlantic, the cry of “Land, ho!” rang through the schooner. The western sun, breaking through a bank of clouds, shone clear and full upon a distant snow-covered mountain-top. The ocean had been crossed, and Iceland was in sight. CHAPTER XX. ON THE COAST OF ICELAND.